Page 19 - Just Deserts

The Decimator

tangled mass of wiring. Seconds were ticking off to zero: 8-7-6-5. Cut
back to Sunderbar’s face: no loss of smile. Back to the timer: 3-2-.
Then the detective coolly pulled one wire loose; the timer
stopped cold, along with an orchestration of stethoscopic
monotony. He straightened up and uttered his trademark tag
line: “Not bad for half a day’s work.”
Iconoplast’s young media genius halted the video. “There you
have bravery under pressure, the average guy who thinks nothing
of disarming a nuclear bomb with his bare hands. How does he
know which wire to pull? Does he have special training? Of
course not: the point is that he is not afraid to take simple and direct
action in the face of an overwhelmingly complex and terrifying
menace. And doesn’t lose his cool, very important: our beer-drinking
friends in the electorate never want to see themselves as afraid of
anything. And here we have the countdown to a nightmare none of
them allow into consciousness: the possibility of nuclear destruction.
Too scary, too out of scale to their lives; comforting to have
someone just like themselves able to deal with it, fearlessly cutting the
Gordian Knot of disarmament’s complexities with a single decisive
blow. The anti-war protesters will not be able to fault you on this
one, since it is a bomb planted within our territory by Mauritian
terrorists. Finally, it is not the government which saves the people,
but an outsider; this plays right into the mindless populism of our
times.”
Sunderbar again felt uncomfortable; the cinematic excerpts made
perfect sense to him, struck all the right chords—but Keller’s
commentary was difficult to follow. He reminded himself that he was
not in the presence of New York film critics, and paid close attention
to the next brief scenario flickering on the screen. The first face he
saw was not his own: it was a black man. Crag blinked, then
remembered the first reel of ‘Decimator V: Tough Enough.’
Landsman had insisted on a non-white face in the film, and the
screenwriters had minimally obliged with a Hollywood stereotype: the
dedicated African-American cop who has risen from his seamy
origins to the lofty moral high ground, where he can alternately chide
his white associates and suffer the consequences of his
uncompromising uppitiness. In this case Detective Johnson would
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